Altar Boys: On Being Dahlin and Being Catholic

Being a Dahlin means being a lot of things.







It means letting the Monkeys out of the Zoo (post 4/29/13). It means being 10 and wrestling an alligator; it means being left behind because there are too many children for parents to keep track (5/13/2013).

It means hand-me-downs that become see through after years of wear and tear before the youngest boy (that's me) inherits them; 

It means pushing broken down cars from one side of the street to the other in the hectic chaos of street cleaning days, it means Milk Wars, it means having an attack rooster instead of a guard dog, it means taking in strays who become part of the family, it means fun and  frivolity.

It includes breeding mosquitoes, looking like you have leprosy, trips across country, running into the President of the United States, being buried in pits or covered in red ants, it means having your pants pulled off in a catholic convent, it means electrocution, pranks, "Templates," simulating UFO's, nearly burning down the Lennon's house and saving others.




It means robbing the Helms truck, passing gas (that's Dooh-Dooh pants) and lots of vomit (that was my superpower) and frequent visit from the Police.

It means tons of kids...

 

and tons of junk...

 ....tons of cars running and not, hot rods, and cruising Van Nuys Blvd.

It means surfing, lots of long hair, lots of friends and Mexican tomato plants.

Oh...and it also meant being cute... (I didn't say anything about being humble).

 Dad "Mr. D" 

  Karl 

 Kurt

 Erick

 Markie D 

...and Being a Dahlin also meant being Catholic.

Being a Catholic meant... Big families... i.e. Dahlins, Blasers, Lennons...etc etc...

....it meant, "Fish Stick Fridays"

...going to Catholic School...i.e. Saint Mark's grammar school in Venice

Being taught by Catholic Nuns...  Catholic nuns with funny names....

...Like Sister Godzilla

and Sister Shultz

It meant being related to a nun  - 

 It meant first holy communion

Dressing up as Saints for Halloween 

 (John the Baptist AKA Wolf Boy) 

...it meant playing in the schoolyard 

fighting in the schoolyard

being whacked with yardsticks by the nuns... 

Attending Mass on Sunday and serving as an ALTAR BOY!  

This is where it gets tricky!

Give a 12-year-old boy a cross, candles and the blunt object to hold against the throat of another 12-year-old (who is about to receive communion) ...NOW you have the recipe for disaster.

that story to follow 

The Great Fire: Who-Dunnit

The list of suspects was long: for the GREAT FIRE "WHO-DUNNIT"

1) My tribe...the Wolf Pack
2) Mr. Blaser
3) Mr. D (that's my dad)
4)Chet Young
5) Frank Nargie
6) Charles Manson
7) Sea-Shell
8) Leeland the want-to-be hot rodder
9) Weenie Tripp
10) Johnny Gillemot
11 Tommy Blaser
12) Four boys dressed as girls
13 The Nuns at Saint Marks who lived just behind the house
14) Crazy, Anti-War, Peace-loving members from an opposing Fraternity

 and NUMBER 14 was "The Consipiracy Theory" - not a man on the grassy knoll, but...
 15) The Owner of the property.

This unsolved mystery turned out to be the greatest disaster on Harding Avenue and third biggest crime in the History of Venice CA.

On our short block on Harding avenue, we had 5 large turn-of-the-century houses with the Lennon Sisters occupying one of these grand masterpieces on the opposite end of the street and us right-smack-dab in the middle.  If this was just a story and not true life, it would have been written this way to symbolically suggest that we were in the geographical center of the universe - and for all intents and purposes WE WERE!

In the picture shown here - practically every car seen was one of ours...except for the Lincoln Continental parked in the driveway next door.  This picture was taken a couple of years ago and you can see my best friend, Tommy, and my little sister, Kjersten playing out front. At this time, however, Tommy was about 9 and loved to play with matches...he loved to burn things up -  that's why he made the list.

You can see the wonderful round turret that graced the craftsman architecture of the old house. This large magnificent home on the corner was owned by a man who lived in Santa Monica that consented to rent it to an ambitious party animal against the wishes of my my dad and the other concerned Real Estate Broker, Mr. Blaser, who lived next door to us (owner of the Lincoln Continental). Making matters worse, the tenant was a friend of my brothers named, Cameroon who decided to turn the old place into a "College Fraternity House."



No one in the neighborhood liked the idea. That's why Mr. D and Mr. Blaser made it on the list of suspects. 




Since most of us are Catholics on our block and had only learned Latin for Mass, we butchered the proper pronunciation of the three Greek Letters...        
            Φ Β Χ 
 ...which Camaroon hung on the front facade that you can see playing "peek-a-boo" behind the palm tree.

Also of note in this picture is the 56' Ford Business Coop parked out in front of the "Frat-House" that is in the beginning stages of  being transformed into the legendary Rat Killer (Shhhhhh - please don't tell Ford Motor Company where their high-performance 427, V8 motor disappeared to - Blog Post 7-4-2013 click here The legendary Rat Killer of Venice ).






 
Anyway, I wasn't about to tell my mom and I certainly wasn't going share this with the priest at confession, but one things that was pretty cool about being the house in the middle of the block was the college girls who walked by our house on their way to the so-called "Frat-House."  I was 12 - not a Zombie.  Ummmmmmm...I know this is the Sixties, but I'm pretty sure that the clothes they were wearing (or should I say lack of clothing) wasn't appropriate at any college in America, unless it was Magical Mystery Tour University.

       Weird...Right? I have no idea what the Beatles were thinking!

Speaking of the ill-clad "frat-girls" I guess some of the members of my tribe - the Wolf Pack, had lost some kind of bizarre bet in the hippie-cave in our backyard while smoking those funny-looking, hand-rolled Zig Zag cigarettes. The outcome of losing the bet was that a couple of  my brothers and several of their glassy-eyed friends had to dress up like girls and try to get into the Fraternity house. A couple of the boys with long hair looked pretty cute - my dad especially loved this - because he got to add this as evidence for his "ahhh...the little girly-men" speech he would often sing-song, invoking his Swedish inflection making fun of older boys who had long hair. I'm not going to lie, however, Chewbacca, looked like the ugliest women you every saw with his pink, poka-dotted dress and beard. The boys looked ridiculous staggering down to the end of the block in their fish net tights, mini-skirts and high heals. What was really gross was that Primo wore a bikini with oranges stuff inside the top.

Two of the hippies pretending to be girls got "hit on" Ewwwww...GROSS! ...and the rest were thrown out. 

That's why four boys ended up on the suspect list - the two that made it in and two who were jealous for getting kicked out. 

Weenie made it on the list just because she lived right next door, but really - anybody in the Tripp Family had motive.With all the wild parties and cars speeding in and out of the dirt driveway, no one on our street would blame them.

No one really knows for sure what happened to "Sea-Shell."  It was one of those, "which came first things"...the chicken or the egg?  Was she always slightly crazy or did that happened to her when her big brother, Camaroom, dropped her on her head from the second story balcony of the Fraternity house after her 15th attempt to sneak in.  Because of the head accident, she definitely makes it on the list.

Four Eyes says that someday they should make a movie based on the Fraternity called Party House or Animal House or something like that - but he was always speaking nonsense - like that is ever going to happen. 

I guess I have to tell you why some of the other people on our street made in on the list and also tell you about the night the Molotov cocktail - the poor man's grenade, smashed through the large plate glass window that sent the house up in an blazing inferno.

“Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself”

                                                          Mark Twain         

                                                       Until next time...   Happy New Year!

The GREAT Escape, Well, not exactly?

Where were we after Bob Dylan tried to get in on the act... I have to admit it was nice of him to be taken in by the Markie D thing... Thanks Bob for putting me on track 3! (Oh, last post - if you want to hear it).

Anyway, by now it's close to 4:00pm Saturday September 10th 1966, Mom and JERRY took off in a blur - rushing Chewy to the emergency room at Saint John's Hospital in Santa Monica (thank you guardian angel for looking out for me - that broken arm sure came at the right time - see blog-post "Flying Leap 8-12-2013).  

So far today: You've met Honking-Slurping-Pooping Jimmy, witnessed Chewbacca and the rattlesnake electric therapy, saw me get attacked by a garter snake and Chewy loose Iguana Del Dialbo with the subsequent choas at poor Mrs. Tripp's house. Then there was 'O cool-Johnny Gillemot being a teenage under-aged driver wreaking his mom's car...the staged accident with Gherhing the Great, the Helms Bakery heist, the awful discovery of Jimmy's "fort-warming" present, hopeful Jerry "TT" chasing the boys up the third story only to have them escape out the window...me trapped in the second floor sun-room and trying to leap to death...only to be caught by Jerry and saved in the nick of time when the Wolf Pack had electrocuted Chewy (who was on his way down the "fire-escape" pole) only to break his arm in two places and was now being rushed to the hospital by my mom in Jerry's car.

Jerry was gone! That was all that mattered!  Can I get an AMEN?

Gherhing the Great was intrigued by Gustav's legendary  RAT KILLER!   If the name doesn't make sense to you, it's probably because you don't know that a big-block Chevy motor (427's and 454's) were affectionately called "Rat" motors.

Well, Gustav was a Ford guy (sorry all you Chevy guys)! And like Dr. Frankenstein he stole..oops... he acquired a Ford high-performance 427 and made a monster of a Chevy destroying beast out of 56 Ford business coup (MUST SEE BLOG POST "Hair, Hippies, and Hot Rods" July 4th).  Gustav was a genius with an exceptionally high IQ and put Ford parts together in a way that baffled even the Ford engineers in Dearborn i.e. his Ford was a Chevy "Rat" killer!  (Rather a "RAT" Annihilator)!

                   It's alive!

Rumor had it that it was a Holman and Moody built motor... but this was his own creation that beat everything he came up against. He was a legend at Lions Race Car Track and on Van Nuys Boulevard where the silly valley-boys who purchased brand new 409s and went cruising on Wednesday nights to impress the ladies.  

Here is some home video of Lions Drag Strip from 1966.  ANYWAY, O' Gherhing the Great couldn't keep his paws off the Rat Killer as he climbed underneath and checked out every inch of it, while the Wolf Pack was in the house laughing about runnin' off 'O Jerry and about Chewy's broken arm. Gherhing discovered that the sheet-metal indentation in the trunk where the spare tire usually sat, was cut away and only had a piece of fabric glued in its place. Guess what "Gherhing-the-not-so-great" did? He talked me into climbing into the trunk of my brother's race car!  How many times can I say, Bad Idea!

BAD IDEA!
BAD IDEA!
BAD IDEA!


Yeah, we crawled in! Of course Gherhing began monkeying around with his racing harness and floor shifter and other junk until we heard Dr. Frankenstein (That's Gustav) come walking back in the direction of infamous RAT KILLER! We knew we were in trouble and climbed back into the trunk area and hid as quietly as we could in the stripped down, bare-metal, grease-smeared compartment.  I gulped as though it were a Déjà vu...the tin Hamper of Death, only this didn't smell like diapers - it smelled like gear oil which was nearly as bad to my super-sniffer and was bound to be a hundred times faster. I socked Gherhing in the stomach just as Gustav fired up the monster.   

In retrospect, I'm pretty sure Gustav knew we were in there, but had pretended not to notice us. Slowly, he moseyed on down Harding Avenue not to draw the ire of good 'O Mr. Lennon and turned onto Venice Boulevard heading east. We were tossed back and forth as the motor rocked the car from side to side as he sat at the light at Lincoln Boulevard at idle. Then, just as if he was at Lion's drag-strip...he revved up his "stall-torque converter" to 4,000 RPM and as the light turned green he punched the pedal to the metal with the Tachometer needle pegging the red-line at 8,000.  With his wrinkle-wall tires that had been screwed to the rims the front lifted off the street and we shot off like a rocket launch. ONLY!

Only, Gherhing and I were like astronauts on a horizontal takeoff that had not been strapped into the rocket! Gustav's car was a true 10 second 1/4 mile hot rod. In order to achieve that, you had to reach something like 157 miles-an-hour in that short distance. Oh Yeah! I think Gustav knew, we were in there...and when he hit the throttle, Gherhing and I shot back into the rear of the trunk and were pinned against one another and to the metal, held in place by 11-year-old, bone-crushing, lung-suffocating, lips-folding-back, tear-producing, pee-pee-making amounts of G-forces and heavy metal thunder! 

You know that ride at POP (Pacific Ocean Park) where it spins and the floor drops out and you stick to the walls - well, this was like that - only 10 times more. Gherhing was stuck to me and I was stuck to the back and I could feel his warm pee-pee seeping into my pants and my lips felt like they were going to peel all the way back over my head like a zipper. Yeah, Gustav got us good... but then it got worst!
 


Sirens!   The Venice Police Department Tried to catch the Rat Killer!   Good luck with that one!

Gherhing and I got flung to one side, (squealing tires) then the other...(burning rubber) then the other... then upside down... then twisted... then another turn down Glyndon and my face was in Gherhing's wet pants...WET PANTS? PEE! Hello! I vomited and it sprayed the entire trunk space of the Rat Killer...Gherhing and I kept getting thrown around in it like we were pieces of chicken being coated up on the outside by throw-up! Gherhing - threw up! What took him so long?  It was GROSS! I threw up again just after Gustav made a screeching right turn and my warm vomit of oatmeal and spoiled milk went directly in Gherhing's face. Gross and double gross!

Gustav spun the car around one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees slamming on the brakes perfectly parallel parking between two cars on Vienna Ave. He jumped out through passenger window of the car and just walked away - whistling like nothing had ever happened. By then, four Cop cars came careening around the corner and sped on past as Gustave just waved nonchalantly. Gustav was already a couple blocks away when one of the police cars came back.  An officer looked inside as Gherhing and I were peeling ourselves off of the froth and begged him to arrest us.

He wasn't too happy and stood with his arms indignantly folded waiting for us to emerge from the hole we had previously climbed into. I held my hands out to him expecting him to hand-cuff us...but when he took one look at us...or was it... when he took one whiff of us...he gagged - ran for his car and told us to get home. There was no way he was taking us back to the Venice Police station. I was hoping for a good meal! We walked over to the Tikker's house and sprayed each other off with the water hose. We hooked our little fingers and I made a promise not to tell anyone about how he pee'd his pants!  I still think it was a bad idea, but Gherhing the Great thought this was THE BEST DAY EVER! 

We walked back to Harding just in time to get in on the Wolf Pack's awful prank on the little old lady next door! 

Poor Edna... and even worst - poor, poor, poor Hutch! (As Steppenwolf would later say) The Wolf Pack "...was born to be wild"     

 Oh and also we got back in time to watch as the Wolf Pack nearly burned down the Lennon house!